Who is the ChiefHomeOfficer?

YOU are - or anyone who works from home. Whether you're a full-time 1099er, a corporate teleworking W-2er, a part-time eBayer, or any head-of-household handling family, finances and affairs from a corner desk - and in search of a little balance in the home office, then ChiefHomeOfficer's your destination.
Think of Chief Home Officer.com as LifeHacker meets the home office - no matter what home office you run. Entrepreneurs will discover SOHO 2.0 business insight. Teleworkers will learn leading-edge remote work strategies. will spot tips, tales and links on balance. And those considering making the leap into home officing will unearth equal parts reality and validation. Explore. Learn. Return.

The SOHO Sherpa…

ChiefHomeOfficer is your SOHO Sherpa - a guide to all the things that make the Small Or Home Office (SOHO) work. Since 1993, we've chronicled the work-at-home adventure. Today, the site offers honest and occasionally humorous insights, tips, tech/product reviews, and commentary that cut through the "Make Millions From Home" promise and just lay down the real skinny on a lifestyle people can work and live with.

Want to learn more? If you work from home, want to, or are a corporate marketer hoping to talk to those who do, email jeff [at] chiefhomeofficer dot com.

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Business is booming. Clients are happy. Checks are abundant. And the assignment board is full. But so are your nights and weekends, as you strive to meet deadlines you agreed to weeks or even months ago, when things seemed much leaner on the new business front – and in the checking account. The writing business – actually, any entrepreneurial enterprise, where the proprietor is working solo – is a quirky thing. Always keen to win new business and broaden our list of new clients, we take on assignments with often reckless abandon – and without regard for how a backlog of deadlines will affect us in the weeks or months ahead. We also fear the threat of a business slowdown; thus, refusing to turn down work is a way of hedging against the ghost of a lull. Time was when any work was good work. But with the maturity of a writing business comes additional assignments from existing clients, and referrals from colleagues and other allies in the field. Combined, these can conspire create a calendar filled. You’re skipping meals, losing sleep and stressing on how you’re going to meet your promised timetable. Why does this happen? How can we avoid it tomorrow?

The dilemma often is borne of a variety of sources. Loyal clients call, frantically begging you to agree to meet a short schedule. You oblige, and rightly so. Then a potential client from a publication we’ve been looking to break into calls with a short due date – almost deliberately testing your mettle to meet an impossible deadline. Keen to make their pages and grow your business, you oblige. And rightly so.

Then a publication or company you’ve never heard of calls desperately seeking a writer or contractor. It’s in a field you’ll have to spend some time learning, but they pay higher than your regular scale. And so in the interest of raising your pay scale, you oblige – and rightly so. Eventually, you’ve obliged yourself into chaos.

Add to these experiences those assignments that require travel or interviews out of the home office, and the stress is heightened. Not only does the time away sap moments that otherwise would have been used to work toward a deadline, but you often return to a daunting plethora of mail – e-, snail- and voice- – that create an encumbered homecoming.

Friends and family who sense your stress tell you to subcontract out your labors, to hire other writers or researchers – anyone to help meet your deadlines. But we can’t, we proclaim. Our editors and clients hire us for our abilities and style. Because we work solo and have this “sole proprietor” frame of mind, we feel we can’t really “staff up” the assembly line in order to meet our deadlines.

CASH AND KARMA: THE 1099ers’ HEROIN

Sometimes, we simply don’t know when – or how – to say when. Cash flow and good karma are like heroin. When business is booming and clients are happy, it feels really good. You’re more than a writer. You’re a reliable partner to your clients, a clutch hitter they can rely on to pull them through. And we know that a little pain endured right now meeting their deadlines will result in positive cash flow in a month or so when the checks start rolling in.

Today, a variety of variables should be used when determining whether you should take on a new assignment. Will new work over-burden an existing workload, creating unneeded stress in an admittedly self-prescribed SOHO lifestyle? Are you already swamped? Is the pay scale is too low, the subject will take you too far afield from your given subject areas, or the rights and ownership of the article once delivered leave you nothing but a clip, a check and a Form-1099 in return?

And will new assignments – and the resulting bylines – cause conflicts with other publications for whom we write? This is especially important when writers become “specialists” in a given field, and their reputations as such result in calls from other editors looking for just such a specialist.

These are all valid reasons to turn down work. Here’s a few ways to break the logjam that often confronts the overworked writer or contractor:

• Know when to say when. If you’re swamped with existing clients and work, learn to turn down new queries – even from existing clients. It’s a skill that takes time to hone. Eventually, loyal clients will respect that you value the quality of the work you provide to them enough not to stretch your resources too thin to meet their every need.

• Beg for a time shift. If your assignment board shows that the week of March 6 already has several assignments due, get your clients to shift their deadlines – especially if you know they have long lead-times between due dates and pub dates. If you can eke out several extra days, that can be helpful.

• Monday, please… Sometimes, editors assign deadlines for Fridays – for no other reason than it’s a way to end the week. Kindly ask them to shift it to the following Monday instead. If you’re friendly with that editor, jokingly ask if they truly intend to edit the work before the weekend. If they don’t, tell them you can use the extra several days to refine and hone the assignment.

• Reward existing clients. Turn down new work from new clients if they compete with existing client publications. We need to be partners with our editors, and taking on assignments from competing publications doesn’t help their title – and in turn them, or us.

• Plan around travel. Travel and outside interviews can tap precious time. If you know travel – for business or pleasure – will take you away from the home office, organize your writing process around that itinerary. Spend a day knocking out research and interviews. Sometimes, the threat of time lost to travel can become a great motivator to shift the business into high gear.

• Get the wheels rolling early. As a writer, research drives a good story. Do your interviews, library and Web research early enough so that when it comes time to write, it’s all waiting for you to just plug into a coherent form.

• Outsource. Sure, our clients hire us for the way we string sentences together. But that’s not to say we can’t hire a researcher to scour the ’net in search of experts, articles or research on our topic de jour, or even conduct interviews. That leaves us to do the writing. Browse through Writers Guide or chat with some of your peers in your local market to develop a fair hourly rate to pay your researcher. Once you develop a good working relationship, they will come to know what you’re looking for with each article. It could make for a lucrative business alliance.

• Grow high-return work. Often writers substitute volume for high-return work. Instead of making $1,000 in billings out of five $200 articles or projects, instead shoot for two $500 pieces. This takes time to develop your abilities and reputation – and for word to spread. With a stable of regular, fair-paying clients, you’ll feel more at ease turning away queries from those whose payscale doesn’t meet your growing expectations. Just be firm but kind; even with editors you end up not working with, you want to be known as a fair and amiable scribe (a good reputation can go a long way).

• If it ain’t yours, don’t take it. With the growth of Web ’zines or Internet-based publications, many writers are noticing a spike in their new writing opportunities. Problem is, many editors are seeking “all rights in perpetuity” following initial publication (without a corresponding hike in scale for such rights). Some writers don’t mind giving up their rights in return for a clip and a paycheck. But for others, that’s not good business. Either negotiate full or shared ownership, or let the editor know you can’t sign such an agreement.

DECLINING WORK TACTFULLY

So we realize that we must – occasionally – turn down work. To be sure, it doesn’t make the task any easier. As freelancers (of any sort) well versed in occasional hand-to-mouth subsistence farming, it’s downright unnatural. Crafting the right argument, therefore, becomes a challenge. You want to be sincere and tactful, but firm – both declining current work, but welcoming calls in the future should the need arise. Whether it’s the rights, the fee or the fear of taxing an already filled workload, be honest – with the editor and yourself.

To be sure, we’ll continue to stretch our resources. We’ll take on more assignments than we’re reasonably able to handle. We’ll awaken early, work late, crank through weekends, and lament all the while this crazy workload we’ve agreed to. But in about a month or so, when the checks start filtering in, we’ll be thankful that we had taken on the work, though likely forgetful that we had such a hard time in the process.